Got a (Legal) Concert Recording? Pass It On

By NANCY GOHRING

Published: March 6, 2003

MUSIC fans are keeping a venerable tradition of the 1960's alive: following their favorite bands around the country, making recordings of concerts, and trading those recordings. But the tradition has been given new life through vastly improved technology that allows recordings to be duplicated without the loss of the sound and feeling of the original, and through the Internet's role as a meeting place for fans seeking to exchange their favorite performances.

It is not just that the recordings of live performances are of far better quality than the scratchy cassettes of 40 years ago. It is that copies of such a recording, and subsequent copies of the copies, are better.

Some fans have set up Web sites -- www.etree.org , www.furthurnet.org , www.phishhook.com , www.gdlive.com , www.shns.net are just a few -- through which anyone can gain access to the improved recordings at no charge. Some of the sites allow users to download directly; others connect users with fans who maintain their own servers with recordings to trade. The sites' mailing lists allow collectors to exchange information about how and where to download recordings of shows.

There is no official tally of such sites or of how many concerts are in circulation. But Steve Hormell, one of the founders of Etree, said the site had 25,000 active traders. One of those traders, Chris Mahovlic of Cleveland, said he had about 10,000 files of live recordings available for exchange.

The most heavily traded groups are jam bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish, the Allman Brothers and the Dave Matthews Band, which improvise long sections of their concerts. Other bands whose concerts are frequently recorded and swapped include U2, Metallica and Ben Harper.

Mr. Hormell said artists had not objected to the new forms of recording or to the Web sites because the sites generally follow informal ground rules. One is that collectors may not trade recordings made without a band's permission; many sites ban people who try to do so.

"The whole thought is, why would we do anything to put us in jeopardy?" Mr. Mahovlic said.

Another rule is that no fan should make money from trading.

"If we so much as put a banner ad on our site, we're done," Mr. Hormell said.

The new recordings are of much higher quality than the older tapes, in part because they are often made in electronic digital format. Some bands sell tickets for a special section of the hall for fans who want to record the show, and allow them to record directly from the sound equipment.

But the biggest recent improvement, traders say, is that files can now be transferred using slightly compressed formats like Shorten, which they say does not degrade the quality of the original recording.

MP3 files are one-tenth the size of the original, making them easy to handle. But many music fans, like Mr. Hormell of Etree, say that MP3 sound quality is poor because the format analyzes the sound frequencies in a recording and drops sounds it decides are not easily detected by the human ear. For that reason, the MP3 format is known as a lossy technology.

Many of the new sites forbid the use of MP3 files, favoring the Shorten format, or FLAC, a newer one. These are known as lossless technologies because they remove useless bytes of data rather then sound frequencies, said Stephen Croes, dean of the music technology division at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. For example, a lossless format might strip out an unnecessary line of data that includes only zeros, he said. The resulting sound is no different than the original.

On the other hand, listeners say they can hear the difference between an MP3 file and the original. "For those who care about sound, MP3 is nothing more than a reference," Mr. Croes said.

Mr. Hormell said he could hardly bear to listen to an MP3 of a concert recording. "When I listen to an MP3 of an album, it doesn't bother me," he said. "But when I listen to a live show in MP3, I go crazy."

Shorten was written in 1992 by Tony Robinson, then a research assistant at Cambridge University studying speech recognition technology. He created Shorten to compress audio files so that he could send them by e-mail.

"I had no idea of shifting whole tracks or albums," he said.

But in the late 1990's, music fans who frequented www.sugarmegs .org, a site from which music can be downloaded, stumbled on Shorten. Shorten files are large in size, but that has become less of a problem as more people have shifted to high-speed connections.

At a site like Etree, the music files are spread out among many users. Still, online Shorten file trading is only for the dedicated. A Phish concert of two hours and 40 minutes could take more than four hours to download with a broadband connection.

Executives at record companies say they are not happy about all this.

"Certainly, if the music industry and the majority of artists had their way, there would be some control over it or some compensation," said Hugh Surratt, a senior vice president with RCA Records, which records the Dave Matthews Band. Mr. Matthews declined to comment.

Mr. Surratt said record companies could not do much to intervene because they are not involved in live concerts.

"It's really more artist- and artist management-driven as to what they do inside the venues," he said.